Of gypsies and zanders
Richard West
Wisbech, Cambridgeshire
The screech of the jet fighters makes life alarming here as everywhere in East Anglia. The Royal Air Force is blamed for all sorts of things. When I asked at a pub about the mysterious case of a number of whales that had beached themselves and died in the Wash, the publican told me: `This happened at Holbeach where the RAF has a bombing range. I think the whales were deafened by bombs and lost their sense of direction. The authorities deny this but I know it's true'. This reminded me of that sad case of the turtles on some Pacific
island where they had nuclear tests; when the turtles hatched they scrambled inland instead of towards the sea.
This is anyway a rather sinister part of England, somewhere between the Fens and the Marshland. The Marsh, strange though it sounds, is higher land than the Fens, so that you find churches dating back to the 13th century, whereas the Fens were under water until the Dutch came over to teach us irrigation. 'Let's face it', a farmer told me, `if it wasn't for the Dutch we'd still be under water. We've always been centuries behind on technology'. Many houses in the surrounding villages are old, as one can see from the windows bricked up. Did it never occur to the English, after the window tax was abolished, to unbrick their windows?
The people round here are still commen- dably bloody-minded towards authority. The Race Relations Act is ignored in places like Emneth, the strawberry-growing region, where much of the casual work has always been done by gypsies. The
Blacksmith pub proclaims 'No Troublesome Van-Dwellers'. The splendid Companion Guide to East Anglia by John Seymour praises the Swan in Emneth as `one of the pubs in the Wisbech fruit- growing district that does not display the racialist (and illegal) sign NO VAN- DWELLERS'. Now it does. And so it should, if it wants to. The Race Relations Act is a great impertinence. But one does feel a cer- tain sympathy for the gypsies who, although of a different, darker race, are not the sort of people to get any help from the Race Relations Board. They are by old!. tion individualists and implacably arit'. socialist. Many of them now are rich an have Jaguars, and they patronise verY it liberal sports like cock-fighting and bare' fist boxing. If one stands up for the gypsies, on prim ciple, one should stand up for anther minority group here in Wisbech, the bikers. They are pretty unattractive youths, wh°80 in for crucifix ear-rings; yet they bave,,a case, as presented in their broadsheet of t" Motor Cycle Action Group. The law °I) crash helmets started what they see ast repression. 'We are at the present monlen under threat of even tougher noise regulae- tions which will ultimately mean a corilPieta revision of what we today recognise te proper bike'. That is the test of a genti,a liberal: whether you want people to hake even noisier motor bikes. This Motor C)'d Action Group has its hero, Fred Hill, n°! 2o5vetrim70e,s wfohro`ihkaesrsbereinghtots,p.rison more OP Perhaps Fred Hill is a reincarnation the William Godwin, the Wisbech man vit)le became the mentor of Shelley and als° the husband of Mary Wollstonecroft, .0 dreadful feminist. He was a Calvirli t before he became an anarchist. One Illigjlof have known it. The Calvinist doctrine of the Elect has been responsible for m°51 our isms and ocracies, preaching the sanc., ty of a social class (the workers), a nativ:). (the Germans) or a race (the Afrikanero The way that Godwin won power it Shelley and also bled him of inonot. reproduced in the present day in onr v„a. skyist factions, each of which is in the .O1 trol of a bossy old man who does very nice'
out of his rich, middle-class acolytes. r.
Wisbech today is nothing like the altrt'y chy that Godwin wanted. Private Pr°Pc„aly and the private motor car are the 'f al values. If you walk down any street ° of village here you are bayed at by dozensaoy savage guard dogs, trained to regard e.ci pedestrian as a menace. In this, respect Ta. Anglia rather resembles South Afil ajl where dogs are trained to regard pedestrians as hostile, because black. .,ati The Wisbech district is also enornloi'ia, rich. Anything grows here, even magOota, which I thought were semi-tropical °hey `Londoners would have heart failure if td" knew what was wasted here,' I was t°,I, to Emneth. 'Across the livay they se'',01 Sainsbury's, who specify a particular sitr'ia, vegetables, so that anything too big, forbid stance cauliflowers, is put in that huge and maybe goes for animal food.' ,lad The richness of the silt land may n°10 to for ever. The good soil is receding eic'glec the basic clay. Also the Cambridge'60 people have spoiled the county by teaf the down the hedges, to the detriment °„1.,,reil wild life. The guard on the train nbs'hot that you used to see dozens of herntlS plc not any longer. The Cambridgeshire Pre bY may also have done a disservice to nattcter, introducing a continental fish, the zantas- or pike-perch, to the rivers. 'It's redWol ty, like cod', I was told, 'but it's a COo 111 the sense that it not only eats other fish out kills them for fun. It's depleting stock.' i The zander is good for anglers though, n swhat is the best part of England for the 4Port. Even children manage to get pike as _ large as 30 lbs. Because this is pike and 4.ander country, East Anglia is now much lanyolved in rbo.lish t the great debate on whether to he use of live bait, as Birmingham ce081% has done. The Angling Times has and out strongly against live bait: 'Sanity allay Inunanity rule in the world, thankfully, angle bY suPporting them [the Birmingham 'ers] we will be seen by everyone as the
decent caring folk we all really are.'
The decent, caring folk of the Angling Times do not want to carry their sanity and humanity to some of the other baits used by fishermen. 'Fish evoke these emotions', the editorialist goes on, 'and are a higher life force. Maggots and worms just do not hit the same mark'. Some contributors to the Angling Times even want to do away with the use of barbs on hooks, as cruel. It seems that anglers are frightened of getting un- popular in the same way as fox-hunters. Perhaps we shall soon be told that the zander really enjoys being caught.
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